


Metamorphosis

by Alysswolf



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen, Post Regeneration, Time War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-16 22:16:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 759
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1363681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Alysswolf/pseuds/Alysswolf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The War Doctor starts his new life and prepares to go to war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis

_"All the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men."_    John Alexander McCrae, MD (d. 1918)

  


It was the silence that troubled him the most.

All of his lives he had lived upon a stage, acting out his current life to the barely audible whispers of his past lives. Like an audience of ghosts in his mind they whispered subtle rhetorical comments on actions, words or even thoughts. Barely audible these whispers; no clear words he could refute or take pride in, just the soft murmurs of lives who would have done things differently or who merely felt the need to make sarcastic observations. 

At first, on the long climb down the steep slopes of Karn to the TARDIS, the voices had risen to more audible howls of protest. Each of his earlier lives seemed to have a burning need to tell him that he was wrong, that he had betrayed them all, and most of all he had betrayed the promise they had made when they took the name of The Doctor. The only silence had come from his just discarded life, perhaps the only one among the chorus who felt he shared the responsibility for what he had become. Now all the voices were silent and he was alone.

_Make me a warrior_.

Easier said than done although he sensed a subtle shift in how he viewed the world through these new eyes. At least he had eyes. He didn’t need the accumulated wisdom of his discarded lives to tell him that making blanket, open-ended statements like that to the Sisterhood of Karn was a recipe for disaster. Apparently the ravages of the Time War had frightened even them into a semblance of discretion.

As he approached the wreck of Cass’s spaceship, he wondered how the TARDIS would react to this new incarnation. The personality encapsulated in its core had opinions, strong ones. He often wondered exactly who was piloting whom but somewhere along in the Fourth or Fifth life had decided not to really look too deeply into the issue. The TARDIS’ opinion mattered more to him that all the voices of his past lives. If it accepted the new necessity, the betrayal of his promise at the beginning of their journey, then he thought that he could bear the judgment of all the others. The TARDIS was the one constant in his life, the thread that bound all his lives together on this grand adventure he had embarked upon so many centuries before.

At first, standing at a stubbornly unresponsive door, his worst fears seemed realized.

After a long moment the door opened and he walked into the control room that looked exactly as he had left it a few hours, one lifetime, ago. The TARDIS had been known to do a complete makeover to accommodate a new life, so he wasn’t sure what to make of this lack of change. It was disturbing and reassuring at the same time. The TARDIS was a master of mixed signals that could mean anything and often meant something entirely unexpected.

Now the question seemed to be where to go to start fighting this war. Up to now he had stayed on the fringes, putting out fires where he could and rescuing the innocent when the fury of the Time Lords and Daleks set all of time and space aflame. A war with no battlefront, fought across all of time and space, made deciding where to take a stand difficult.

As he puttered around the TARDIS getting used to this new body, he pondered where and when. Earth, so far, was unaffected by the war so he could safely leave the inhabitants in their cul-de-sac. Keeping as far away from Earth as possible seemed to be the prudent course of action.

“Well, why not?” he finally muttered in frustration. He’d more than once lived his lives flying by the seat of his pants, ending up light years away from the place he wanted to go. Now that he thought about it, the unintended destination often proved to be far more interesting than his intended destination. Random chance was probably as good a way of making a decision as any other he could think of at the moment.

“Take me someplace useful,” he told the TARDIS and sent her hurtling away from Karn.

As he hunted down a change of outfit he hoped he was ready for whatever battlefield the TARDIS thought might be useful.

The End

**Author's Note:**

> The quote at the beginning is from a comment made by Colonel McRae, a Canadian surgeon in World War I. McRae wrote the poem "In Flanders' Fields." It seemed very appropriate.


End file.
